J-Roc
02-24-2008, 01:07 AM
I would like to share some information with you about leap years. I am fortunate to be a leapling and was born on Febuary 29 back in the glory days of 1984. I often find myself explaining the inner workings of the leap to most if not all people i strike up a conversation with.
Most people dont truly understand how the calender works and even less understand why each month has a diffrent amount of days in it. The main reason is that eventually there will be a year far into the distant future where all months have 31 days. This is due to the fact that the earth takes 365.24219 days to orbit the sun in a lunar year. Essentually we round the extra hours and minutes to 6 hours. So every four years we add an extra day to help bring us closer to the actual time taken to orbit the sun. This in itself isnt enough and we would fall out of sync with the orbit. To help correct this, we do not add a leap year to the last year of a century unless it is divisable by 400. This helps to restore balance in the seasonal cycles. But what about the extra minutes and seconds. They will eventually build up untill we gain another day in the callendar. However, even then there will be a few minutes and seconds unaccounted for. Thies too will build up untill we gain yet another day. This will go on for a long time untill there is a year many thousands of years into the future where all 12 months will contain 31 days.
Allthough i cant find any exact dates of when thies anomalies occur i did manage to track down a rough estimate of a year which will contain 3 extra days.
The net effect is to make the adopted average length of the year 365.2425 days. The difference between this and the true length will not have a serious effect for many thousands of years. (The error amounts to about 3 days in 10,000 years.)
My goal is to helps clear up any confusion or mystery about the Leap Year.
I hope you all have as much fun reading about this as i did writing it :)
Most people dont truly understand how the calender works and even less understand why each month has a diffrent amount of days in it. The main reason is that eventually there will be a year far into the distant future where all months have 31 days. This is due to the fact that the earth takes 365.24219 days to orbit the sun in a lunar year. Essentually we round the extra hours and minutes to 6 hours. So every four years we add an extra day to help bring us closer to the actual time taken to orbit the sun. This in itself isnt enough and we would fall out of sync with the orbit. To help correct this, we do not add a leap year to the last year of a century unless it is divisable by 400. This helps to restore balance in the seasonal cycles. But what about the extra minutes and seconds. They will eventually build up untill we gain another day in the callendar. However, even then there will be a few minutes and seconds unaccounted for. Thies too will build up untill we gain yet another day. This will go on for a long time untill there is a year many thousands of years into the future where all 12 months will contain 31 days.
Allthough i cant find any exact dates of when thies anomalies occur i did manage to track down a rough estimate of a year which will contain 3 extra days.
The net effect is to make the adopted average length of the year 365.2425 days. The difference between this and the true length will not have a serious effect for many thousands of years. (The error amounts to about 3 days in 10,000 years.)
My goal is to helps clear up any confusion or mystery about the Leap Year.
I hope you all have as much fun reading about this as i did writing it :)